Shortages of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes
The testimony of Gün Benderli
Gün Benderli’s autobiography, Su Başında Durmuşuz (We Have Stood by the Water), in which she chiefly recounts her political memoirs, contains a number of observations worth noting on the scarcity of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes and the poor quality of those that were available.
In August 1952, Benderli arrived by train in Hungary -the country where she would spend the greater part of her life- with her then husband, Necil Togay. She describes her first impressions after leaving Keleti (Eastern) Station in the following words:
The moment I stepped out of the station, I felt as though I had been struck by lightning. I thought I was literally going to faint. Keleti Station is right in the heart of the city. So the moment you leave the station, you find yourself immediately on one of the city’s shopping streets. Whether you like it or not, the first things you see are the shops. My God, until then I had never seen shop windows so neglected, so dusty and so ugly. And in those windows, goods that were pitifully shabby and decrepit.
(…) The state of Budapest’s shops really came as a shock to me. (Gün Benderli, Su Başında Durmuşuz, İletişim Yayınları, 1st edition, 2022, Istanbul, p. 171)
In this passage, Benderli is not referring to empty shelves or to a shortage of consumer goods. In any case, she could hardly have made such an observation the moment she arrived. What struck her eye at once was the neglect of the shops, the dust on the display windows, and the shabbiness of the goods on show. The situation was so bad that, for a moment, Benderli felt she really was about to faint.
Some may find Benderli’s reaction exaggerated. I do not. For the first face a capital city presents to the outside world, right at its centre, to be so poor, so ugly and so neglected must have suggested to Benderli that this was not merely a temporary failing. It seems that the scene she encountered in Budapest struck her as different from, and more disturbing than, the forms of poverty she had seen before. As someone who had burnt her bridges and left her country behind, it is entirely understandable that such a sight should have filled her with anxiety about the kind of life that awaited her.
Following this anecdote, Benderli also provides some information about the boarding house in Budapest where she and her husband stayed for a while. During these first months, since the meals were prepared by those who ran the boarding house and she herself was not much involved in the shopping, she did not yet experience the city’s food shortages at first hand. Before long, however, she began to realise that even obtaining the most basic foodstuffs was a serious problem:
All the rooms in this boarding house, which occupied a large flat, opened onto a spacious hall. There was a huge table there, around which we gathered in the evenings. We ate our meals there, at a very low price. The boarding house was run by a woman named Eszter Fekete, who was considerably older than we were. Together with her assistant, Annuska, she dealt with the shopping and the preparation of the meals. At the time, I had no idea how difficult a task this was. One day, when Eszter came back from the market and said with delight, “I found tomato paste”, I was quite taken aback. I did not do any shopping myself, nor did I go to the grocer’s or anywhere of that sort. Meals were simply set before me, whether in the Radio canteen, in a restaurant, or here at the boarding house. As it turned out, in those days even obtaining the most essential foodstuffs was quite an achievement. Eszter never let us feel the lack of anything. I also saw Eszter’s husband, Pali, from time to time, though I did not know what he did. Although no friendship developed between us, I only realised much later that Eszter and Pál Fekete, who had been a great help to me, worked for the Hungarian security services. (pp. 192-193)
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| The Stalin monument in Budapest’s City Park. |
In those days in Budapest, when even lemons were unavailable, let alone oranges, mandarins and bananas, the sight of crates of lemons being carried into that shop in full view of everyone, and of Soviet women coming out with bulging shopping bags, quite understandably aroused anger among onlookers. (p. 208)
It is a well-known fact that under Stalinist regimes the bureaucracy became detached from the living conditions of ordinary people and developed interests of its own. What makes the picture here even more striking, however, is that, alongside the privileged local bureaucratic caste, the bureaucrats of another ‘great’ power -one directly involved in the governance of the country- also constituted a second privileged stratum.
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| The damaged head of the Stalin statue in Budapest after it was torn down and dragged through the streets (1956). |
Around us there were only foreigners -indeed, only Soviets, only Russians. Good Lord, what did they not have with them, in their hands? Sewing machines, little trunks, enormous suitcases, even chandeliers -there was everything; they were taking everything away with them. They were quite literally moving house. There is a saying, “the sheep worries about its life, the butcher about his meat”, and it was exactly like that. Everyone knew that this steamer about to leave the quay was the last one, and it was perfectly obvious how many people and how much luggage it could carry. Yet on the quay there was a mass of people and possessions far beyond the ship’s capacity. Even today, in a calmer frame of mind, I still cannot find words to describe the behaviour of those Russian women that day. One could hardly help feeling that the national guards shaking their fists at them were in the right. (pp. 291-292)
To be continued
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